Shane Hegarty's encyclopaedia of modern Ireland
The National Car Test is famously fussy. No county on licence plate: fail. Window not rolling down fully: fail. Daniel Bedingfield on the car stereo: fail. Leaving €50 in the glove apartment to be accidentally discovered by the inspector: suspended jail sentence.
The NCT has its good points, obviously. You no longer see so many cars on the road being held together by a length of twine, for example. But it might also explain why we buy so many new cars: it's to save time and money. There is the pre-NCT check, followed by the service, at which point the mechanic tells you you'll pass, no problem. So you go for the NCT, fail and return to the pre-NCT-check garage, where the mechanic scratches his heads and says: "They'll fail you on anything these days. It's a lottery, really."
After which you have to go all the way back and do the NCT retest, which you pass on the proviso that you bring it back to a garage and have a couple of niggles smoothed out. By
which time you are only a couple of months away from your next NCT, and the cycle starts
all over again.
It is not as if we drive a fleet of Herbies, but there is a strange phenomenon whereby a car seems to realise when it's due its NCT, suddenly displaying the constitution of a chain-smoking asthmatic. It will wheeze. It will splutter. It will make a funny sound from a spot you just can't pinpoint. It will start cold mornings with the reluctance of a hung-over student.
At the NCT centre people peer anxiously through the window into the garage. They gnaw on the coffee-machine plastic cups, knowing now what it might be like to watch their Leaving Cert being marked. The car is driven up; the NCT mechanic hovers around it, under it, in it. He always stops and stares for an age at a point behind a wheel, then picks at it as if he thinks he might have
spotted a lost Caravaggio. If you can see him whistling through his teeth, shaking his head and scribbling on his pad, then you know things aren't good. When the other mechanics abandon their cars, so they can all come and have a look at yours, it's probably best to sneak out and get the bus home.
When they eventually apprise you of the problems with your vehicle, it is with a well-practised disgust, as if they have never seen such shameful abuse of an automobile in all their lives, as if people who do that kind of thing to a 1999 Seat Ibiza need locking up. The trick with the NCT is to take deep breaths and let it happen. It's like quicksand. The more you struggle, the faster you sink. Don't forget: glaring in disbelief at the NCT mechanic is an automatic fail.